Behind the Scenes: Building the House in Kings of Summer

In this season's coming-of-age film, Kings of Summer, three teenagers construct their own home in the woods of Ohio, using whatever materials and tools they can get their hands on. The resulting house – which resembles something between a massive play fort and off-the-grid shack – is nevertheless an accurate portrayal of something that the kids really could have built with a couple hundred bucks, stolen lumber, and ten week off of school. We spoke to production designer Tyler Robinson about his initial design sessions, the weeks-long construction process, and what happened when it rained.

The House

The House

Once the house was framed out, Robinson's team added various flotsam and jetsam: a strip of fence, boards from a palette, a sheet of tin. "I thought the best way to approach building the house was going out and finding the objects, which is how the kids would have done it themselves," he says. "We had two guys spend a week just driving around with a box truck. They found wood from old shacks falling apart, there was a power house that they were able to pull tin off, they collected old palettes."

The Porch

The Porch

"One of the big inspirations for the design came from a house I grew up in. My dad was a contractor, and we lived off the grid. He would save whatever leftover materials they had from other projects, and he built on these additional rooms. It was all properly built, but there was a hippie feel. I wanted to capture something similar."